Uprooted Palestinians are at the heart of the conflict in the M.E Palestinians uprooted by force of arms. Yet faced immense difficulties have survived, kept alive their history and culture, passed keys of family homes in occupied Palestine from one generation to the next.

Saturday, 22 April 2017

21st Century Wire’s Vanessa Beeley speaks to Mike Robinson about the recent murder of children enticed off a bus with the promise of food. This was the most obscene war crime and brings the conflict in Syria to a new low.

At the centre of it all are Boris Johnson sponsored White Helmets. Please share this video, and with a general election in the UK, ask some hard questions of all prospective MPs.

On April 15th 2017, the people of Kafarya and Foua were attacked, their children mown down deliberately, by a suicide bomb or expolosive detonation, that targeted these innocent children who had been lured to their deaths by NATO and Gulf state terrorists, including Ahrar al Sham and Nusra Front (Al Qaeda). Mothers had to watch from behind the windows of the buses they had been imprisoned in for 48 hours, while strangers, terrorists, picked up their children, their wounded, bleeding, mutilated children, and piled them up in the backs of trucks and Turkish ambulances before driving them away from the horrific scene and stealing them from their distraught, powerless mothers.

“This is Zeinab, she was forced to watch the massacre of 116 children through the windows of a bus while the NATO and Gulf state terrorists, collected the dead, dying and mutilated bodies of her community’s children and flung them in the back of trucks and Turkish ambulances, before driving them to Turkey. She has 10 members of her family still missing. She has no idea where they are.

She gave her courageous and emotional testimony to us in Jebrin registration centre, where the survivors of the 15th April, suicide bomb attack, were taken for shelter after this horrific event, described by CNN as a “hiccup”.

I speak about part of her testimony with RT yesterday who also used my interviews in their news feed. Unlike corporate media, RT investigate these atrocities and honour the voices of the Syrian people.

The Telegraph edited out this appalling and callous phrasing immediately after the RT interview.

The Telegraphdescribed the dead Syrian babies as “Syrian Government supporters” in an attempt to whitewash the UK Regime terrorist crimes by proxy and to erase the existence of these innocent children from our consciousness..by the familiar dehumanization process that we have witnessed every time the various NATO and Gulf state extremist carry out mass murder of Syrian civilians.” ~ Vanessa Beeley

Bombed out remains of one of the buses that had been carrying evacuated civilians from Kafarya and Foua to Rashideen holding centre. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

Vanessa Beeley, associate editor at 21st Century Wire, was present at the scene and provided video footage of the witness and survivor testimony to RT for use in the news section. She also spoke to RT about the heartbreaking accounts given to her by Zeinab, a mother, from these besieged Idlib villages of Kafarya and Foua, who had seen the carnage and who still has 10 missing relatives, who were taken to Turkey by the waiting ambulances. A full report, and subtitled video will follow shortly, when internet and time allows, but for now, here is the report from RT and the interview at the end of the report.

Eyewitnesses to the bomb attack on a refugee convoy near Aleppo that killed dozens of children said the militants lured people out of the vehicles with snacks before the explosion, and also stopped them from escaping the blast site.

A powerful explosion hit several buses full of people leaving militant-held towns and villages outside Aleppo last Saturday, killing over 100 people, including dozens of children, and injuring scores more.

Following the attack, Vanessa Beeley of the 21st Century Wire website gathered first-hand accounts from those who survived the assault. People told her that the militants did their utmost to increase the death toll. The exclusive videos she provided to RT shed more light on the incident.

“Just before the explosion, a strange car got from the militants’ checkpoint. They said they were bringing snacks for children,” the bus driver who was in the convoy said.

“Then they got out of the car and started shouting, ‘Who has children? Who has children?’”

The driver said the militants knew for sure that the children “haven’t seen biscuits and crisps for so long” as they were under siege. “People have been stuck in buses for 48 hours as the rebels didn’t let us out,” he noted. A woman said that she and other evacuees were held in the buses “like prisoners,” adding that they were only allowed to get out and stretch 10 minutes before the explosion.

Many people, including children, left the buses and approached the car when the blast hit the convoy.

One of evacuees said that the militants “were throwing potato chips on the site of the future blast. One of the terrorists said that it was food for the infidels.”

The driver recalled that “there were Ahrar ash-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra [Al-Nusra Front], and some factions of the Free Syrian Army [FSA]…”

According to another witness, “the Ahrar ash-Sham fighters didn’t hide their faces, while Jabhat al-Nusra were always wearing masks. One could only see their eyes,” one of the eyewitnesses said.

WARNING:Graphic and distressing footage from the attack ~

There were many foreigners among the terrorists – “Uzbeks, Turks, people from Chechnya, Saudis and Qataris. One could judge on their appearance; their language,” another evacuee added.

“When the blast rocked the area, people rushed into the woods but militants surrounded them and forced back to the buses,” the bus driver said.

A female evacuee recalled that “the militants told us that terrorists from another group were shelling our buses and that we must flee towards the bushes… but then they said that the bushes were mined and found ourselves trapped.”

Another woman also told Beeley that even before the explosion, four yellow Turkish ambulances were present at the scene for some reason. After the blast, the ambulances started picking up the dead and injured, only to take them to an unknown location.

“We don’t know where they [the children] are. They’re gone. There are no bodies. We’ve searched for them, but with no result,” one of the witnesses said.

Many relatives of those missing still know nothing of their whereabouts, other witnesses said. Some people told Beeley that the controversial White Helmets were also seen at the blast site, retrieving bodies of Al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham militants, but apparently leaving injured civilians.

Beeley, who has consistently covered the Syrian war, also filmed people’s testimonies about their escape from the rebel-held areas. The evacuees boarded the buses on Friday in the Rashideen neighborhood of Aleppo, but were not allowed out of the vehicles for nearly three days.

Many of them, however, were happy to leave as “this place turned into a terrorists’ hotbed,” one woman said.

[Some] international organizations have already condemned the attack on the humanitarian convoy in the strongest terms.

“We must draw from this not only anger, but renewed determination to reach all the innocent children throughout Syria with help and comfort,” said UNICEF’s executive director, Anthony Lake.

“And draw from it also the hope that all those with the heart and the power to end this war will do so.”

However, Beeley told RT that not many in the West followed the UN’s example in decrying the attack.

“We’ve just witnessed one of the most heinous crimes of our lifetime, and yet corporate… there’s no international condemnation from governments, from NGOs, from the media,” she said.

On the contrary, the media is making an attempt to “whitewash this utterly abhorrent” incident, in which, according to Beeley’s information, 116 children lost their lives.

Part II

The stories of the Syrian government’s alleged use of gas against its own people never stopped since 2013 despite clear indications of terrorist rebels being the actual perpetrators or at least propagandists behind them. To quote from this 2015 CounterPunch article:

On October 1, 2014, the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) announced that the elimination of prohibited chemical weapons and facilities in Syria had been successfully completed. It was a remarkable achievement and the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

According to its report, in May 2014, an OPCW team tried to investigate at the site of alleged chlorine gas attacks. The Syrian government gave the OPCW team passage to the rebel controlled area but the convoy was attacked by a rebel faction. None of the team members was injured but that stopped their on-site investigation. Instead, the OPCW worked with the well-funded opposition-supporting Violations Documentation Center to arrange interviews with numerous people from three villages. The interviews were conducted outside Syria, probably in Turkey. They gathered photographs, videos and other evidence and expressed “high confidence that chlorine had been used as a weapon in Syria” in three villages. They did not ascribe responsibility.

United Nations investigators received testimonies from Syrian eyewitnesses regarding another attempt by Al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists and their “rescue” teams to stage a chlorine attack in the town of Al-Tamanah on the night of April 29–30, 2014, and then spread word of the bogus attack through social media.

“Seven witnesses stated that frequent alerts [about an imminent chlorine weapons attack by the government] had been issued, but in fact no incidents with chemicals took place,” the U.N. report stated. “While people sought safety after the warnings, their homes were looted and rumours spread that the events were being staged. … [T]hey [these witnesses] had come forward to contest the wide-spread false media reports.”

So Assad hands over his chemical weapons to the OPCW and allows them to conduct their investigations. The Al-Qaeda affiliated rebels, on the other hand, attack the OPCW, spread lies about gas attacks and loot the homes of civilians. Conclusion: “It was Assad’s gas!” Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

The April 4, 2017, Gas Attacks in Khan Shaykhun

Fast forward to 2017. After having gone through all the trouble with the false flag gas attacks or respective propaganda and fake news ever since 2013, the notion that Assad would do the anti-Assad forces the huge favor of committing PR-seppuku by actually carrying out gas attacks against the civilian population is so ridiculous as to be almost beyond imagination. To once again quote from the same CounterPunch article:

On March 30, US Secretary of State Rex Tillersonsaid that the future leader of Syria should be determined by the people of Syria.

This major policy statement by the US took regime change off the table, and was obviously great news for Bashar al-Assad. Combined with Syrian military gains on the ground, Assad was in the strongest position he’d been in since the war in Syria began.

So, why 5 days later would he gas his own people?

To give the U.S. a good excuse to missile strike Syrian military installations? To strengthen international opposition against his regime? Because Assad does not like victory? Most likely not. When crimes such as these are committed, the two standard questions to consider are “Who could have pulled it off?” and cui bono or “Who stood to gain from it?” Assad could have pulled it off, but that is also true for the Al-Nusra Front rebels who already perpetrated such an attack in 2013 with the help of outside forces. As confirmed by the events that unfolded after the attacks, however, it was not Assad but only the rebels and other anti-Assad forces that would be the primary beneficiaries of these attacks. Despite being a ‘morally flexible’ son of a dictator and a dictator himself, it is therefore rather unlikely that Assad ordered the attacks and rather likely that the attacks were committed by anti-Assad forces, also given that pretty much the same thing already happened in 2013.

“Enemy warplanes of Israel launched two missiles from the occupied territory [Golan Heights] at 18:45 [local time] on one of the positions of our army. It caused material damage,” the source told Sputnik.

According to the source, the strike was carried out when the Syrian army was repelling terrorists’ attack in Quneitra.

“These actions will not stop the fight of our Armed Forces against terrorist groups which are close to Israel,” the source added.

Earlier, the IDF said that a projectile was launched from the Syrian territory and fell on the Israeli-controlled part of the Golan Heights, causing no injuries. The Israeli military did not specify whether or not the shelling from the Syrian territory was deliberate or there was an accidental overflight of a projectile or mines through a dividing line. The troops have been searching the area.

In November, the IDF said a missile believed to be launched from Syria, hit the Israeli-controlled northern Golan Heights without causing any casualties. The IDF responded with retaliatory fire.

Israel occupied the Golan Heights in the 1967 Six-Day War with Syria and annexed the territory in 1981. The international community has not recognized the Israeli annexation

Russia and Syria are holding talks on the supplies of additional air defense systems to the war-torn country, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said in an interview with Sputnik.

Al-Assad said that Damascus is interested in Russia’s last generation air defense systems.

“Of course, we need more armaments after the war and because of the consumption, and this is part of the daily relation between the two institutions in the Ministry of Defense in Russia and Syria,” Assad said.

He further disputed the United Nations’ death toll numbers of the six-year conflict, arguing that the West uses inflated figures to justify intervention.

Al-Assad maintained that neither the UN nor any other monitors have the means to calculate the number of casualties because of various factions on the ground, including “foreigners, Syrians and terrorists.”

“Of course, we can talk about thousands of missing people that we don’t know anything about their fate. This is the official number,” al-Assad said.

“So, the numbers that we’ve been hearing in the Western media during the last six years were not precise, it’s only to inflate the number just to show how horrible the situation [is], to use it as humanitarian pretext to intervene in Syria,” al-Assad said.

The US-led coalition of 68 nations is conducting airstrikes against Daesh in Syria without either Damascus’ or the UN’s approval, thus, violating the international law.

Al-Assad further explained why the Syrian air defense did not down US cruise missiles that targeted a Syrian airbase in the Hama province earlier this month.

He said that over 50 percent of Syrian air defenses had been destroyed by terrorists.

“We don’t have to give a precise number now, because as you know it’s military information, but I can tell you more than fifty percent,” al-Assad said of the destroyed air defense systems.

He explained the systems’ inability to take down US Tomahawk missiles on April 7 as “technically complicated because the missile must see its target.”

Terrorist attacks were the second reason behind the Syrian air defense system’s inability to shoot down the Tomahawks, al-Assad added.

Local EditorIn an exclusive interview with Sputnik, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stressed that his government demanded sending UN experts to investigate the alleged Khan Shaykhun chemical attack, however its request remains unanswered due to US and other Western countries’ pressure.

“We formally sent a letter to the United Nations, we asked them in that letter to send a delegation in order to investigate what happened in Khan Shaykhun,” al-Assad said.

“Of course till this moment they didn’t send [the experts], because the West and the US blocked any delegation from coming,” he added.

The Syrian President believes that Washington is hampering the probe because if the experts arrive in Idlib, as he was quoted saying: “they will find that all their [the US] narratives about what happened in Khan Shaykhun and then the attack on Shayrat airport was a false flag, was a lie.”

“Now the only contact I think is between Russia and maybe the other countries in order to send that delegation. Till this moment, we didn’t have any positive news regarding any delegation coming,” he added.

On April 4, an alleged chemical attack killed dozens of people in the town of Khan Shaykhun in Syria’s Idlib province.

Without any investigation carried out, the US labeled al-Assad’s government as perpetrators and fired a barrage of Tomahawk missiles at the Shayrat airbase, which it said was the source of the attack.

“Actually, since the first attack a few years ago that happened in Aleppo by the terrorists against our army, we asked the United Nations to send investigation delegation in order to prove what we said about the terrorists having gases used against our army, and later many incidents happened in that way, and they didn’t send any delegation. It’s the same now,” al-Assad further noted.

Earlier this week, Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons [OPCW] said that it is identifying sarin in samples related to the April 5 incident.

However, the watchdog never explained how it obtained the samples, as its experts have not visited Khan Shaykhun yet.

“Mint Press” – DAMASCUS– While the public justification for the presence of United States troops in Syria has long been focused on fighting the terror group Daesh (ISIS), the recent actions of the U.S. and its allies within Syria continue to suggest that fighting terrorism is merely a cover for a very different type of operation, one that seeks to keep Syria fragmented and destabilized long after any terrorists are defeated.

On Tuesday, the U.S.-allied militias that have been encircling Raqqa – the de facto stronghold of Daesh – announced that they had formed a “civilian council” to govern Raqqa after its capture from Daesh militants. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a U.S.-backed militia that comprises a large number of Syrian Kurds, claim to have spent six months setting up the council, with a preparatory committee having met “with the people and important tribal figures of Raqqa city to find out their opinions on how to govern it,”Middle East Eye reported.

SDF spokesman Talal Selo stated that some towns near Raqqa had already been turned over to the council following a successful operation to drive out Daesh forces.

The U.S. military had previously hinted that power would be given to rebel groups following Raqqa’s “liberation” when the head of U.S. Central Command General Joseph Votel told the Senate in early March that military officials anticipated “that America’s allies will need assistance preventing their [Daesh’s] return and establishing Syrian-led peacekeeping efforts” after a successful operation.

Considering that the Syrian government is far from being one of “America’s allies,” Votel’s statement implied that the U.S.-backed militias would be given control of Raqqa and the surrounding area, despite the implications this would have for Syrian sovereignty and further destabilization in the war-torn country.

As MintPress previously reported, Votel also told senators that “conventional U.S. forces would be required to stabilize the region once ISIS fighters are flushed from Raqqa,” meaning that the current U.S. troop build-up around Raqqa is by no means a temporary deployment, but rather the foundation for creating a standing army.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has not been surprised as to what the U.S.-backed operation to remove Daesh from Raqqa would bring.

“We support whoever wants to liberate any city from the terrorists, but that doesn’t mean to be liberated from terrorists and being occupied by American forces, for example, or by another proxy, or other terrorists. So, it’s not clear who is going to liberate Raqa. Is it really Syrian forces that are going to hand it over to the Syrian army? Is it going to be in cooperation with the Syrian army? It’s not clear yet.”

Given that the Trump administration’s current position involves the removal of Assad from power, keeping Raqqa out of the Syrian government’s control via a U.S.-backed militia seems like a clear attempt to force Assad’s hand.

While Assad had previously stated that the country’s civil war would likely conclude this year – barring foreign intervention – a U.S.-military-supported rogue government in Raqqa would prevent the Syrian government from reacquiring its territory. Any attempts by the Syrian Army to take back Raqqa from the SDF and U.S. military could allow U.S. officials to demonize Assad and take stronger actions to remove him from power.

However, the U.S. plan is unlikely to go smoothly, given the Kurds’ dominant presence in the SDF. Turkey, Syria’s northern neighbor, will probably not be happy to see a Kurdish-majority group gain governing power over a region near its border, as the Turkish government has long considered Syrian Kurdish militias, including those backed by the U.S., to be terrorist groups. Turkey has repeatedly bombed U.S.-backed Syrian Kurds for this very reason.

The US and its Western allies will use any opportunity to harm Russia, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov told RT. He believes the rise of terrorism in Syria was similar to what happened to his native Chechnya two decades ago.

“The West, Europe do not want to help anyone. The important thing for them is to use every resource against Russia. They want to see us kneeling before them,” Kadyrov said in an exclusive interview with RT’s Arabic channel.

“This will never happen,” he added.

The Chechen Republic in southern Russia was the scene of two military campaigns in the 1990s and early 2000s. Ramzan Kadyrov said his father’s choice to pledge his loyalty to Moscow was the choice of the Chechen people.

“[Ramzan Kadyrov’s father Akhmad] said: if I am the leader of the republic, you let the Chechen people have its word. If the people say that they want to be part of Russia, I will agree to that too. If they say against it, so will I. That was the arrangement. And the people said they want to live as part of Russia,” he said.

Kadyrov reiterated his loyalty to Moscow, both as representative of the Chechen people and as a devout Muslim.

“My people have entrusted me to serve in good faith. And my religion also obliges me to be loyal to the commander-in-chief. As long as this country and this president allow you to build mosques and pray, your duty is to die for this president,” Kadyrov said.

Kadyrov said that Chechens in the 1990s were lured by false promises of people whose sole interest was demolishing Russia. He personally took up arms and fought against the Russian army when he was a teenager, and that is not an experience he wishes his children to have.

“When I took place next to my father with arms in hands, I was younger than my oldest child is now. She is 18 now, and I was 15 or 16. I don’t want my children or children of Chechens or children of anyone in Russia to see what I saw,” he said.

He says foreign special services were involved in the effort to provoke chaos in Chechnya.

“The Western and European special services over the years did every possible and impossible thing to destroy Russia as a sovereign state. They chose the Chechen Republic as the stage for their game,” he said.

“That was not some bandit gang. There were fighters well trained by the special services. Our intelligence says fighters from 50 nations were involved. But Russia prevailed and has proven that she is a strong nation.”

He said the same orchestrated devastation that Chechnya saw two decades ago can now be witnessed in Syria. A battalion of troops from the Chechen Republic currently serves in Syria as military police overseeing the transition period in Aleppo, a city that had lived for years divided between pro-government and anti-government forces.

“What they saw there is the same thing we had here. The same scenario, the same masters,” he said.

Kadyrov, who is accused by critics of violating human rights and putting sharia law above that of Russia’s federal laws, said his critics stir controversy surrounding his name to attack the country and its president.

“They seek any opportunity to stand against [Vladimir] Putin. And Kadyrov is convenient for them. This name is well known and talked about,” he said. “Why wouldn’t they talk about people, who got busted taking bribes? Nobody ever talks about them.”

“They think they can use our people and our youths against Russia again. This won’t happen. They really don’t like it when 50,000 of our people sing the anthem of Russia. Or when we carry the biggest flag of Russia,” he added. “What they would like is for us to march with banners against Russia.”

“They tricked us once, and a second time. But there won’t be a third one.”

The Chechen leader said his alleged suggestion to target relatives of terrorists an example of distorted reporting by his critics.

“They just distort my words however they like. I was talking about people actively supporting terrorists,” he said.

“They are terrorists too. They may not take arms themselves. But why should we help them [with benefits], feed them and provide for them, when they are helping to kill us. They are accomplices of terrorism. We don’t want such people to live here.”

Morales also said foreign and domestic attacks against President Nicolas Maduro and the Bolivarian Revolution are intended to send a threatening message to anti-imperialist governments around the world.

“The plan of the empire is to overthrow the constitutional president elected by Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, as a warning to anti-imperialist governments,” Morales said.

For weeks, opposition demonstrators have held violent protests in several cities across the country, calling for regime change and international intervention. The protesters, backed by the U.S. government and the Organization of American States, OAS, have also supported calls for privatizing Venezuela’s publicly-run Petroleum of Venezuela, PDVSA, oil and natural gas company.

Venezuelan authorities have called on the OAS to condemn the violence perpetrated by the opposition, but to no avail.

Venezuela’s Minister of Interior said recent attacks against civilians and police were planned by the opposition after three people were killed on Wednesday.

Among those killed during protest violence Wednesday was Niumar Jose Sanclemente Barrios, a 28-year-old sergeant with the National Guard, who was apparently killed by sniper fire during riots in the Caracas suburb of San Antonio de las Altas.

“We know there are groups interested in selling the world a country in chaos,” Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami said on Wednesday after the murder.

“Henrique Capriles has said in an irresponsible manner that the government is guilty of these deaths and therefore will have to prove these serious allegations in court.”